To claim them, I have to tell you seven things about myself. After blogging for a year and a half, I sometimes feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to sharing new and interesting tidbits, but I’ll do my best.

1. I was adopted, which you probably already knew, but what you might not have known is that, biologically speaking, I’m White (mostly White), Filipino, and Hawaiian, and that my adopted grandfather is one-hundred-percent Filipino. How cool is that?

2. I lost the fourth grade spelling bee on the word autopsy (which, now that I think about it, was kind of a morbid word for a fourth grade spelling bee). I left out the P. How in heaven’s name did I leave out the P?

3. I remember a lot of my elementary school years by the activity that defined recess. Third grade was the year of the jump rope. Fifth grade was the year of two-hand touch-football. Sixth grade was the year of sitting-around-with-my-friends-and-daydreaming-about-junior-high:)

4. I type pretty fast. During my heyday, I usually typed at around 120 words a minute.

5. I’m a huge BYU football fan--like, colossal. Unfortunately, the BYU football program has had exactly three losing seasons in the last thirty-seven years, and I was a student there for all three of them. Sigh.

6. I was a teaching assistant in the economics department at BYU for about a year and a half. I loved that job. When I had to quit so I could student-teach for my Math Ed degree, I almost cried.

7. I was in labor for twenty-five hours with my first baby and for zero hours with my second. (I ended up having a C-section after those twenty-five hours with I-gots, and we scheduled a C-section with Lady.)

Oh, Pam, you must be a must better jump-roper than I am, then. We never quite graduated to double dutch:) (Although I always wanted to...)

Kris, I remember elementary school with startling clarity. I don't know why I'm wasting my time writing YA - I need to be writing MG and chapter books!

Mary, I'm pretty sure I type as fast as I do because of my writing. They first started teaching us how to type in third grade, and that also happened to be the same year I started writing, so I was typing on the computer A LOT. Nothing like a little repetition for teaching a repetitive skill:)

I remember a lot of elementary school. There was the kissing tag season (I was never tagged.) There was the chinese jumprope/hopscotch/jacks season. There was the weird girly phase in which the girls would stay in the classroom and do hair or fake sing into hairbrushes. Those were good times.

Hi- I've just spent the past couple of days reading through your blog- it's really great! I'm also a mormon mother/writer (who also went to BYU) doing the querying thing right now (when I get a break from my four kids) so it was cool to read about someone else going through the same things! I love the agent interviews you have. Keep it up! Melanie Stanford (you can check me out at daydreamertowriter.blogspot.com)

Kayeleen, I remember those tricksy Chinese jump-rope/ankle-cuff things! Now that I think back on them, I can't help but wonder, are/were they really Chinese?

(Amy, care to chime in on the subject? Do you even know what we're talking about? (For those of you who don't know and just happen to be reading this comment, Amy (www.alsonnichsen.blogspot.com) spent quite a few of her growing-up years in China, and then she lived there as an adult for seven or eight years as well. Pretty cool, don't you think? (The manuscript she's just about ready to query is about an American teenager who comes back to the States after living pretty much her whole life in a small Chinese town, which, I think, she's more than qualified to write about.)))

LOL, Krista, here I was about to comment and then I read a comment addressed to me! That has never happened to me before. :) Well, I don't know if we're talking about the same thing, but in Hong Kong we played a game we called two-four with a long elastic band that two people strung around their ankles in a big loop. Is that called Chinese jump rope here in America? That is too funny. I don't know if it's originally Chinese or not, but we did play it there. :) (And while living in Mainland China I never saw kids playing that game, so go figure....)

I came by originally to say congratulations on your blog awards, and that it was fun to read all the facts about yourself. I knew you were adopted and I knew your grandfather was Filipino, but I didn't realize you were also biologically part Filipino. How cool!

Melanie, there's such a learning curve when it comes to querying. I sent out about 50 queries for the first manuscript I queried and got exactly one request. So it does get better...eventually. Good luck with your YA historical (with a dash of time travel)!

Amy, your two-four sounds like our Chinese jump rope! Interesting that you only saw kids playing it in Hong Kong, not mainland China. (Then again, I haven't seen kids playing Chinese jump rope since I was a kid, so maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe they were playing it in mainland China, too, while you were living in Hong Kong.)

Ooh, I'm realy late here. I just checked in w Twitter and saw your @mention. I've been so busy reading this awesome story about this girl who's startinga revolution against the techno-elite Wingtoothers, but questions her plans when a cute, clumsy wingtooth boy sees something different, something special, in her.